TeX Programming Language Profile

TeX

TeX is a system for computer typesetting. It’s a powerful low-level markup and programming language that creates professional quality typeset text. The system was developed by Donald Knuth at Stanford University with the purpose of enabling anyone to generate high-quality books, and to develop a system that yields the same results whatever computer is used.

TeX has many strengths including its portability, flexibility, and the fact that it is free software. But being free would mean little if TeX was not highly proficient at typesetting professional looking mathematical and scientific text, complex documents, and handling multiple languages. TeX produces results equal in quality and appearance to those produced by the finest traditional typesetting systems. TeX remains popular in academia, especially in mathematics, computer science, economics, engineering, physics, statistics, and quantitative psychology. At the time that TeX was released, it offered some innovative features.

FACTS

RECOMMENDED OPEN SOURCE BOOKS

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR DEVELOPERS

Texmaker – A free, modern and cross-platform LaTeX editor for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows systems that integrates many tools needed to develop documents with LaTeX, in just one application.TeXstudio – An integrated writing environment for creating LaTeX documents.The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN) – The cen­tral place for all kinds of ma­te­rial around TeX.

USEFUL RESOURCES

TeX Users Group – Founded in 1980 to provide an organization for people who are interested in typography and font design, and for users of TeX.TUGboat – The Communications of the TeX Users Group.TeX – LaTeX Stack Exchange – A question and answer site for users of TeX, LaTeX, ConTeXt, and related typesetting systems.